My dad has always been my hero. Bigger than life, able to fix any problem, he could easily leap tall buildings in order to keep us kids safe. He still is my hero, even though I know the tall building thing isn't entirely true.
I remember riding around the neighborhood on my tricycle. I tried to keep up with my older brothers, Mark and Robin, but they had two-wheeler bikes
so I didn't stand a chance. No matter how hard I peddled, they sped ahead of me without really trying.
A few houses away from ours on Jameswood Drive on the airbase in Winnipeg, was a sidewalk that linked Jameswood Drive with Leicester Square. Half-way along this sidewalk was a wooden bridge that spanned a small ditch. The bridge was a simple construction, 2x4s or maybe they were 4x6s, laid across two other boards that spanned the ditch. It was fun to ride across this bridge because there was spaces between the boards and the tires of my tricycle would bump as I rode. If I hummed in my throat as I rode across I would be rewarded with a warble in my voice. I could be entertained in some pretty simple ways in those days.
One of the cross pieces broke, about six or eight inches of it cracking off one end, leaving a gap at that side of the bridge. My challenge became seeing how close I could get my rear tire to that broken part of the bridge. That's the kind of thing this brat would get himself up to when he was four.
Well, I managed to get my rear tire very close to that broken part. So close one day that it went into the gap and I fell off the bridge. Now, a fall of less than one foot is not a big deal unless you are four years old. Being that young and that small, it was a huge fall, worthy of untold wailing and crying.
I managed to recover myself enough to get home where Mom could give me much needed sympathy. Of course, I may have forgotten to tell her that it was my own fault that I fell off the bridge, in fact, my version probably described how the bridge rose up and grabbed me, tossed me into the air and then laughed as I lay in a crumpled heap. What can I say, I'm a brat.
When Dad heard about my catastrophic event, all the fault of that broken bridge, he got out his hammer, saw, a piece of lumber and a tobacco can full of nails, carried all these items to the offending bridge, pried out the broken piece and replaced it with a brand new one. That was how problems were taken care of in those days (early 60s).
Normally a fix like that would require a call to Base Construction Engineering (BCE or just CE in typical military acronyms) and then wait for them to dispatch a crew to do the work, but dad wasn't having any of that.
Every time I rode over that bridge, I took pride in the fact that my father had fixed it. The new board, so much whiter and brighter than the rest, reminded me how he had worked to correct what was wrong. I can still remember watching him as he worked, him hammering the nails to secure the lumber, a clump of his jet-black hair, normally combed back from his forehead, hanging forward, almost into his eyes. His eyes were stern with concentration or with anger at that bridge that had dared to hurt his son.
Even after I had graduated to a two-wheeler and we had moved into a larger PMQ on Leicester Square, I could detect the difference in colour of that newer board.
I have checked out the site on Google Maps (see included photo) and the bridge, as well as the ditch is spanned are gone, just flat grass. How boring. But in my mind I can still see that off-colour board that had been replaced by my superman.
Was one, or both, of your parents the type of person who didn't wait around for someone else to fix things? What are your favorite memories of this?
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